Well an initial test of the high pressure air tank proved fussy. Maybe with the snorkel the beveled/rounded bottom reflects the combustion in an adverse way or maybe just being almost 2 inches shorter than the 20 ounce tank is a factor or both. I have never liked round bottom "jam jars" as much as flat bottom ones.

So I tried the high pressure aluminum air tank again with a shorter 3.75 inch snorkel and it ran well enough sideways but it doesn't sustain in the vertical which is the same behavior for the other (CO2) paintball tanks with a longish snorkel.

In other news I was revisiting an idea of using a typical jam jar to run it on paraffin wax. The idea being like melting a glass beer bottle that is slowly moved closer and closer to a campfire, it won't crack and as such perhaps gradually heating a jam jar with wax for fuel until it starts to smoke or reach the autoignition temperature, would have a chance of working. It might need some puffs of air to air out the jar for starting. One thing about wax as opposed to a low boiling point methanol is the fuel could be considerably hotter instead of how methanol would be sloshing against the sides of the glass making it more likely to crack, usually right at the fuel level. Thus the heat gradient between the melted wax and jar could be such that the jar might be less likely to crack.

He's putting the test tube in water whereupon the tube cracks and the erupting steam carries the vapor up and since the wax is hot enough, all it needs is air to light.
Autoignition of boiling paraffin (candle wax)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgcBeQTpApc

I was watching these gasoline powered jam jars and it dawns on me that much like starting a Dyna-Jet on gas, it might help if you preheated the gasoline. Dyna-Jets are easier to start if hot or until you get a few false starts to heat it up. It seems counterintuitive though, because a jam jar might become too rich to start if not careful, the vapor being heavier than air displacing the oxygen.
"After 45 minuets of trial and error, this was the end result. Unfortunately were missing about 15 seconds of footage at the start, including the lighting of it which burnt a 2cm hole in my glove."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3R9hStCHAg

Note the delay in starting as the flame dwindles and sits on the surface of the gasoline for a bit before the main pulsations start up. This happens with methanol too sometimes.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfb1lhQs4kk

"Paraffin wax is a white or colorless soft solid derivable from petroleum, coal or oil shale, that consists of a mixture of hydrocarbon molecules containing between twenty and forty carbon atoms. It is solid at room temperature and begins to melt above approximately 37 °C (99 °F); its boiling point is >370 °C (698 °F)."

"The boiling point of methanol is 64.7 degrees Celsius, or 148.46 Fahrenheit."

Stress related tidbitshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_bottlehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc1whrZGOZI
I remember one time watching a show on PBS with Dale Chihuly in Seattle where they were making large artistic pieces of glass in a very spacious building with music playing as they worked. He was miffed they had made a work of art for Elton John and he offhandedly asked the students if they had stress-relieved the piece and apparently not which meant it could explode sometime in the future out of the blue.

Quirky thought
"what might work on earth is to make a regular ruperts drop, then while the glass is still plastic use sonic vibrations to press the tail into the glass blob creating a sphere.//
I think what beanangel is suggesting, in his inimitable way, is almost a Prince Rupert's Klein bottle. You protect the tail by putting it inside the drop."
Loris, Jan 06 2017http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Prince_2 ... _20Spheres

Update - obsidian seems a bit too hard to melt with a common torch and it might not be the best material for a Prince Rupert Drop depending on its coefficient of thermal expansion. Wonder what the best concoction of glass making ingredients makes the most impressive drop?
20 tons from a presshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6NUNroyUys

I was thinking drops falling down a flue long enough that they go spherical, but then somehow want to not distort when cold is instantly, somehow, applied. Liquid nitrogen vapor lower in the flue, but with baffles or something to make a sharp change in temperature, I'm thinking. We want the highest delta T possible. Liquid would be much better but you want it in there fast and the splash will distort it obviously.

I'd want glass with the highest strength and I highest thermal expansion un combination so the highest pent up stress is achieved when the exterior flash freeze is accomplished.

To get it to explode, you now need a hard point of carbide, or a diamond point.

Bologna Flasks
"Bologna flasks (or bottles) are blown with the glass pipe like an ordinary small thick walled flask.
The only difference is that instead of putting the red hot flask into the lehr to anneal it free from
strains, it is left out in the cold air. This works in a similar way as intentional quenching on the
outside, but much less so in the interior. Therefore, the flask is toughened only on the outside,
while even a tiny scratch with a hard tip on the interior walls leads to explosion. German
encyclopaedias (Meyer 1885) ascribe the invention to a Mr. Asmadei in 1716. It must have been
discussed all over Europe in the 1740s, as the list of early literature in Krünitz (1780) shows.
It was presented to the Bolognese Academy of Sciences and Art by Balbi in 1745. ‘Bologneser
Flaschen’ are also known in German as ‘Springkolben’ (literally ‘shatter flasks’)."

Modern Thermally Toughened Glass
"De la Bastie’s invention was of no great practical use because the glasses could not be quenched
evenly. The resulting stresses often lead to failure after months without apparent external
cause. Even the modern technique of working with a stream of cold air can only toughen open
forms like sheets (e.g. car side windows), plates, or cups. The French glass company Arcoroc
(2007) produces such a ‘verre trempé’ which can be used to demonstrate the increased fracture
strength."

EXPERIMENT 3
"A plate of ‘verre trempé’ resists blows with a hammer. The tip of a normal nail gets flattened on
trying to hammer it into the plate. Even hardened nails often do not suffice to crack the glass.
It needs special pointed hammers (no nails) such as those provided to create emergency exits
through windows in cars or buses to shatter such a plate."
(From reference 3 in Wikipedia)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_bottle

These are 4 variations from my original 12 ounce paintball tank that used a 3/8 NPT pipe nipple snorkel. The new more audible paintball tank uses a 1/2 snorkel 8 inches long. Then I tried using a reducer and 3/8 inch snorkel and threaded it roughly enough into the neck to hold and run albeit briefly as a beer bottle. Next up I unfolded the rolled seam and hammered it out and just screwed in a 1/2 inch diameter snorkel on the second one, no reducer. Lastly, one of those swaging tools was used to clamp the aluminum ring of the bottle around a piece of 3/4 inch thin wall tubing. It was kind of tricky because you can't just crimp/squeeze it in one go but rather rotate it several times to work it down to that size lest it pinch a piece of the ring which then doesn't fit the mold. The last one is a very light, all aluminum jet (thin wall aluminum snorkel) and has a chance of taking off. It's surprising how stiff that part of the bottle is, you can't flex it with your fingers in the least. The crimp on the aluminum tubing makes a good seal - a good "gas spring" effect if you try to pressurize the snorkeler with your mouth and release the air. Anyway I can't tell what I'm doing because the humidity is so high, it's like walking around in the dark trying to find the best route or like trying to start a fire with wet kindling. Just taking to the air and running a few seconds would be exciting.

A nice variation would be to to launch a beer bottle snorkeler out of a bat tube with some propane like a soft mortar shot and then that burst would throw it in the air with tiny fins on the snorkel maybe and the pulsating snorkeler action ignite and kick in and give it a few seconds of powered flight before giving out. I was launching some Budweiser bottles today using a baseball bat and propane torch fed into the handle of the hollow bat. The bat was one of those with a plastic end piece that I pried off and then removed the vibration dampening material from the interior. I'm sure such a project would meet with a lot of failures before it had any chance of success. Lots to learn and overcome.

Attachments

Last edited by Mark on Fri Aug 04, 2017 12:30 pm, edited 6 times in total.

The bat snorkeler launcher and the newest member of the snorkel family, an 8 dollar heavy CO2 fire extinguisher I bought today and removed the valve, handle and small black fiberglass horn assembly. Had to use a hammer and pipe wrench, the fitting was rather corroded. I buffed off the rust at the top of the tank with the wire wheel on my grinder. Thought I might use the fiberglass horn with faint cloth pattern visible would make possible a toy snorkeler sound augmenter and recalled the Lockwood's used/boasted a fiberglass augments on their duel Lockwood arrangement, that the exhaust was cool enough and touted that in some literature I bought long ago.
The all-aluminum lightweight beer bottle snorkeler will fit inside the bat almost all the way, all but 3/4 inch sticking out the end and it weighs 74 grams or 2.6 ounces. The walls of the beer bottle are about .020th however many seconds that buys you in flight time.
Large Lockwood literature.http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/825218.pdf

Some experiments were done in the hot, humid air yesterday, time spent Zamfiring (pan fluting) different size snorkels with just a few promising barks. Also to illustrate how deleterious this weather, this gallon jug goes off like a bomb in cold weather if methanol is ignited from the center of the jug but several remotely sparked ignitions with double stranded wire in the bottle yesterday, it made nothing more than a very strong base whomp sound that although created some vibration in the nearby wall, it's not a deafening bang, the potential cannon blast sound effect is why it is remotely sparked - for safety reasons. But in this weather it's comparatively tame. One time being a novice mixing aluminum powder and KMnO4, it burned like poorly mixed sugar and potassium nitrate. Next after powdering the purple salt, it made that same energetic muffled whomp or thud, something on the cusp of an explosion, an in-between effect, neither deflagration or all out explosion. Still later with better mixing and risk to life and limb, it was found to detonate completely unconfined, lit with a time delay trick of putting a single drop of glycerin on the pile of powder and stepping back, waiting about ~7 seconds, the interim a wisp of smoke as the glycerin oxidizes and heats up to the ignition point of the Al/KMnO4 mix.

Anyway, here's the versatile whomp-to-bang jug depending on conditions and some photos of a 24 ounce paintball tank with a paintball gun barrel snorkel that barks pretty good/verge of being hard on your ears but only runs about 5-7 seconds full blast in winter and barely ramps up in summer. The tri-clover canister and reducer revved up a few times with different snorkels but nothing to write home about so far. Pictured on the right is the little black fiberglass horn salvaged from a little CO2 fire extinguisher recently purchased that might work as a sound augmenter for some snorkeler effects. The silver metal cone right of the black plastic horn is a piece of lamp pole. Sometimes lamp segments have odd parts that can catch your eye.